The time of the unconscious

On my first visit to Sigmund Freud’s house, I felt as though I had been invited in.

Everything there still breathes the rigour of work, the intensity of silence, and faint glimmers of joy, hope, and beauty.

The perpetual renewal manifested by the garden’s vegetation contrasts with the age of the worn books, worked through, read and reread countless times, with the letters, the texts written in such beautiful hands; the invitation of the couch, dense with ancient transfers, is so strong, so present, so palpable.

The murmurs of all those objects, still rich with a few dreams, those interrupted by war and exile, and the last ones perhaps, steeped in this place vibrating with the desire to go on discovering continue to resonate.

This house is a sanctuary, a temple of exile and thought, of family life, where the more discreet presence of Anna is also very gentle.

This dwelling exhales the breath of questioning as thought edges into language, from the mother tongue to the adopted language in which the trace demands to be taken up again.

The chronology of history, the suitcases, the departure coexists with that other time which does not pass; historical time bends before the time of the unconscious, that time without a clock, where memory is not behind us but still in the process of coming into being.

See you soon, Professor Freud, I shall join you for tea…